Recording of the Week, Eric Coates from John Wilson and the BBC Philharmonic

With their shared conviction that ‘light music’ and standard classical repertoire are both key components of a balanced musical diet, Eric Coates and John Wilson seem to be natural bedfellows, and today delivers the fourth volume of Wilson’s entertaining, affectionate survey of the British composer's orchestral works with the BBC Philharmonic.

As I recently discovered via George Hall’s excellent interview with Wilson in The Stage, we have Eric’s son Austin to thank for kickstarting the conductor’s prolific recording career back in the late 1990s, when he approached Wilson to commit some of his father’s music to disc with the BBC Concert Orchestra. (The first instalment Under the Stars was re-released digitally a few months ago, whilst the sequel The Enchanted Garden is available on Presto CD).

And it was a very young Austin who ‘commissioned’ the most characterful work on this latest album - a zany, concise little orchestral fantasy on Goldilocks and the Three Bears which was conceived as a fourth-birthday present for Coates Junior and was premiered at a Queen’s Hall Prom in 1926. (As Richard Bratby recounts in his lively booklet-note, early fans of the piece included Edward Elgar, who was spotted swaying along to it at a concert in Eastbourne a month later).

Like all good fairy-tales, Coates’s musical narrative expertly balances light and dark elements: after a portentous, brass-heavy opening that’s oddly reminiscent of Puccini’s Turandot (which had premiered only a few months earlier), there’s just a flash of Bartók in Wooden Prince mode before Coates settles into his trademark jazz-inflected sunniness as Goldilocks rises, shines and sets off to investigate her ursine neighbours.

You might catch a tantalising echo of Sibelius’s tone-poems as she moves through the forest, and the ever-so-slightly foreboding woodwind trio representing the Three Bears themselves seems to anticipate Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (then ten years in the future), but the prevailing mood is one of sweetness and light – and a whisper of sensuality too as Goldilocks falls asleep where she shouldn’t, to the accompaniment of that heady, swooning string sound which Wilson always conjures up so well.

Another work which is shot through with echoes and foreshadowings of more ‘heavyweight’ European composers is the Four Centuries Suite from 1941, which takes us on a whistle-stop tour of dance music from circa 1700 to the Roaring Twenties, guided by a solo flute which represents the muse Terpsichore and had me thinking back to Debussy’s Syrinx and ‘La flûte enchantée’ from Ravel’s Shéhérazade.

An enthusiastic, accomplished dancer himself, Coates has a whale of a time whipping up a cod-seventeenth-century hornpipe which seems to point the way to Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, then paying tribute to the nineteenth-century kings of waltz (ushered in via a beguiling harp solo which seems to owe a little something to the Song To The Moon from Dvořák’s Rusalka).

The shorter, more quintessentially Coatesian pieces are all done with bags of charm, panache and attention to the fine details of the composer’s piquant orchestration. The ‘Rediffusion March’ Music Everywhere (which became the theme-tune for Britain’s first independent broadcasting service in 1948) bristles with a peppy energy that’s familiar from Coates’s famous Calling All Workers and the opening section of the march which eventually gained immortality in the 1955 film The Dam Busters. Wilson, as ever, summons a delightfully period-appropriate sound from the BBC Philharmonic here, with a warm, lit-from-within string sound and plenty of edge on the brass – and the mock-dramatic climax of the piece is delivered with near-cinematic grandeur.

Further opportunity to wallow in that lush string-playing comes with the charming miniature Under the Stars: along with Ravel’s Boléro (composed in the same year), this was one of the first orchestral works to deploy a saxophone, which shines through quite beautifully here. Coates’s three-movement musical autobiography From Meadow to Mayfair also receives a beguiling outing, although it has to be said that the atmosphere is decidedly urbane from the beginning: country-dance rhythms and the odd ‘rustic’ bassoon interjection aside, Eric never really sounds like he had mud on his boots.

Replete with catchy melodies and vivid orchestral colours, this lovely series continues to surprise and delight, and makes for perfect summer listening – do explore the earlier instalments if you haven’t already.